“I wanted my sons to know where they came from,” Linda Leith remarked recently to The Monitor, NDG’s community newspaper. Because she was never able to talk to her father and find out who he really was, Leith, founder of the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, wanted to write her story and offer it [...]

THROUGH BLACK SPRUCE SURVIVAL KIT: flannel pyjamas, fleecy slippers, a woollen blanket, a cat and a crackling fire to ward off cold weather from up north and cold characters from down south. It’s a cold not unlike “a living thing that chases … and wants to suck the life” from us.

IN THE POPULAR IMAGINATION, the American frontier means the Wild West, Billy the Kid, Jesse James and Daniel Boone. Though these symbols date from more than a hundred years ago, a frontier still exists today. Ronald Wright’s new book offers a convincing argument that a frontier mentality persists and dominates the American psyche, some 120 [...]